KDEs' Multimedia needs

[Matthias Welwarsky]

Hi all,

I remember there's been lengthy discussions about arts or !arts around KDE 
Release 2 or so. There even was a meeting on IRC where people discussed what 
demands KDE has regarding the handling of multimedia data. I'm trying to 
recall now what was found back then, please correct my mistakes.

Ideally, KDE needs:

A sound server. So far so well, but with what features, what would we want:
- simultaneous access
- network transparency (?)
- low latency
- bitrate resampling, most cheap soundcards support only 48kHz nowadays
- more than one stereo channel, e.g. for surround sound capable hardware
- not necessarily, but probably also recoding of different raw input formats, 
like le16/be16, 8bit ulaw, etc...
- recording, of course
- in short, everything you'd want your soundcard to do.

A codec layer. We definitely need an easy to access possibility to plug in 
codecs for alls those funky sound and video formats. I'm all against 
burdening this tedious stuff onto application programmers.



-- 
Matthias Welwarsky
Fachschaft Informatik FH Darmstadt
Email: matze at stud.fbi.fh-darmstadt.de

"all software sucks equally, but some software is more equal"